dev meeting 20200723

Present at the meeting:

• Sonja Heinze (@pitag-ha)
• Carl Eastlund (@ceastlund)
• Jérémie Dimino (@jeremiedimino)
• Nathan Rebours (@NathanReb)

Current plan

• Sonja looks into tyxml's code generator to ensure the ppxlib port didn't break locations
• Sonja adds support for instrumenter (such as bisect_ppx) in ppxlib
• Nathan finishes the work on documentation by adding an example deriver and adding dumpast to ppxlib
• Nathan looks at adding bucklescript support in ppxlib
• Carl makes ppxlib compatible with omp2

Meeting notes

Sonja finished opening all PRs to the project she's been porting and they started receiving feedback from the maintainers. There are things to look into the most important ones being:

• Ensure we didn't break locations in tyxml's ppx based code generator
• Clarify the story with the Ast_mapper exposed in jsoo for building custom toplevels.
• Make sure we can maintain the bucklescript compat driver shipped in bisect_ppx. We discussed this a bit and it would be good to discuss it with @aantron who authored the corresponding features in OMP.

She also started looking into instrumenter support, we clarified some points during the meeting: an instrumenter transformation should either run after all other transformations have or right after the preprocess_impl transformations but before anything else. This should be configured by the instrumenter authors.

Carl finished the work for omp2 and it's now been merged!

Nathan worked on the documentation by adding a getting started section with helpers to understand the AST and to write one's first extension rewriter or deriver. He also added a simple example for a concrete extension rewriter. What's left now is adding an example deriver, importing dumpast into ppxlib and ship it as part of a separate ppxlib-bin package and mention it in the AST section of the getting started.